ife! It's to make us work and
grow, make us fine and awake and alive to everything worth living for!
No laziness for you, my dear, no soft, cosy kitten life! You're to be a
woman, a real one! Don't let there be any mistake about that!"

In the other room Joe was at his piano, and the music he was playing had
nothing to do with--any one else. She did not say, "with Amy." She
frowned a little and cut herself short, as she so often did in her
thinking, these days, when it touched upon her sister. She could feel
Amy here at so many points, and she did not want to be jealous.

"I wonder where we're going tonight."

What was it Joe was playing? Music she had heard before. She did not
like to ask him and so betray her ignorance. "I ought to know this!
What is it?" she asked herself impatiently. "Why, of course! It's from
'Boheme'!" She smiled as she felt he was playing to her. With the
thrill now so familiar, she felt her power over him. She remembered
little tussles in which she had been victorious. They had all been over
his business. Joe, the poor darling, had formed the idea (she did not
say from his first wife) that if a man is in love with a woman he must
express it by loading her down with things which cost a lot of money,
that he must work for her, slave for her! But Ethel was putting an end
to that. They had taken back Susette's old nurse, for it was unfair to
one's husband to be a child's slave if there was no need. But she had
refused to get other servants. Emily Giles was still in charge, and
though Emily of her own accord had gone to a shop on Fifth Avenue and
purchased caps and aprons, "the nattiest things this side of France,"
she wore them with a genial air and spoke of them as "my uniform." Ethel
took care of her own room and helped Emily with the cleaning. She had
kept expenses firmly down, and she had refused to be loaded with gifts.
When Joe had urged that his affairs were going so much better now, she
had said in her new decisive voice:

"I'm so glad to hear it, my love, for it simply means you've no earthly
excuse for staying late at your office. I don't mean I want you to
loaf, you know," she had gone on more earnestly. "I want you to work
and do, oh, so much, all the things you dreamed of doing--over there in
Paris. But I'm not going to have you make your business a mere rush for
a lot of money we don't need!" She had gone to him suddenly. "And just
now I want you so."

By these talks she had alrea